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THE NEW YORKER, JULY 20, 2015
Museums and Libraries
Metropolitan Museum
"Navigating the West: George
Caleb Bingham and the River"
From 1845 to 1857, the self-taught
Missouri painter composed some
o the most indelible images in
nineteenth-century American art:
scenes o men in boats on the
Mississippi and its tributaries, the
Ohio and the Missouri. His subjects
were hardy, working-class types, with
broad faces and wide-set eyes, seen
in repose on the waterways---stock,
i languid, genre scenes that implied
the picturesque taming o the Wild
West. In "Fur Traders Descending
the Missouri," the irst and greatest
o the group, an old man and his son
stare straight at us as they paddle
downriver, a bear cub leashed to
the prow o their canoe---the scene
is riveting for its stillness and its
enigmatic white-gold glow. Although
Bingham never quite mastered human
anatomy, his riparian landscapes o
untouched forests and mirroring
waters are nothing short o sublime.
Save for a pair o nocturnes, it seems
to always be early morning or late
afternoon; crepuscular light su uses
vast skies to suggest both the dawn o
a prosperous new American age and
the twilight o a vanishing frontier
life. Through Sept. 20.
Museum of Modern Art
"Zoe Leonard: Analogue"
The irst exhibition o photography
in the museum's atrium features more
than four hundred small pictures o
old-fashioned commerce: storefronts,
signage, and merchandise. I Leon-
ard's over-all approach is conceptual,
her take is also traditional; she was
inspired by Eugène Atget, Berenice
Abbott, and Walker Evans, all o
whom documented cities in transition.
The earliest photographs here were
made in the late nineteen-nineties
on the Lower East Side, Leonard's
neighborhood at the time and still
home to mom-and-pop ventures
with names like Fashion World and
Cosmo Beauty Shop. In the years
since, the series has expanded to
include images from Eastern Europe,
Cuba, and Africa, grouped together
in gridded "chapters" that focus on
hand-painted signs, logos, artless
shopwindow displays, or jumbles
o lea-market goods. For a project
about globalization and obsolescence,
what comes across most forcefully is
Leonard's genuine appreciation o fast
disappearing local---and nondigital---
worlds. Through Aug. 30.
MOMA PS1
"Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys:
Fine Arts"
In an acerbic installation, the Belgian
duo has created their own provincial
museum, complete with carpeted
loors, more than eighty watercolors,
and spectators in the form o cutouts
a ixed with caricatured faces. Some
o the watercolors reproduce famous
art works (Gainsborough's "Mr. and
Mrs. Andrews," Caillebotte's "Paris
Street: Rainy Day"), some are bucolic
(a horse, an upturned cart), some are
nakedly racist (a black weightlifter
wearing a leopard skin). De Gruyter
& Thys's pretty little pictures swing
so easily between the pastoral and the
colonialist that each one starts to feel
suspect. It would be easy to conclude
that the artists are simply indicting a
previous century's pictorial traditions.
But a single painting here, o a new
Audi (the brand recently conceded its
use o concentration-camp labor) in
a picturesque German town, implies
that these pictures might not be
things o the past. Through Aug. 31.
Frick Collection
"Leighton's Flaming June"
Sir Frederick Leighton's lashy painting
o a drowsy damsel in a see-through
sa ron gown, "Flaming June" (1895),
on loan from the Art Museum o
Ponce, Puerto Rico, looks better in
reproduction than in the lesh. It
is bad in piquant ways. Regard the
foregrounded colossal thigh, like a
genetically enhanced drumstick. See
the picture's soignée style sputter at
the top, in a haplessly cobbled swatch
o seascape. Like the Pre-Raphaelites
he followed, Leighton accoutered
Victorian constraint with steam vents
o aphrodisia, set gingerly in distant
climes (storybook Mediterranean,
here). Obliged to share the Frick's
Oval Room, the museum's four
wonderful full-length Whistler por-
traits look on with arch forbearance.
Through Sept. 6.
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Galleries---Chelsea
Elmer Bischoff
Large, moody, startlingly strong
paintings, made between 1953 and
1972, argue for greater recognition
for the Bay Area peer o Richard
Diebenkorn and David Park. Bischo
countered Abstract Expressionism
(which he knew irst hand, as a
student o Cly ord Still and Mark
Rothko) with a stubborn loyalty
to iguration. His style might be
termed Neo-Expressionist avant la
lettre, but with deep roots in modern
traditions. Smoldering color and
furious brushwork lend as much
drama to a domestic scene, "Girl
Getting a Haircut" (1962), as to a
grand sea view, "Figure at Window
with Boat" (1966). You feel as much
as see the art. It feels like joy under
pressure. Through Aug. 14. (Adams,
525-531 W. 26th St. 212-564-8480.)
Jack Pierson
The cool dude o salvaged-signage
sculpture and homoerotic photog-
raphy shows his hand at abstract
painting and drawing, pursued
during a sojourn on North Captiva
Island, in Florida. Not bad! Seen
singly or in a gridded array, scores
o little pictures---most measuring
fourteen by eleven inches---deploy
impulsive, rough-textured slather
and swirl in tenderly muted colors.
This work o "an old beatnik" (as
Pierson now terms himsel ) exudes
a sort o sexily disintegrated School
o Paris air, with native a inities to
Brice Marden and Bill Jensen. Some
drawings bear on sex directly, with
Picassoid contortions starring the
anus. Through Aug. 29. (Cheim &
Read, 547 W. 25th St. 212-242-7727.)
Deborah Remington
These revelatory abstract paintings,
made between 1963 and 1983, in-
volve cunning near-symmetries and
strange palettes o burnt orange and
Kelly green against ields o black.
Remington began painting in San
Francisco, as part o the Beat scene,
and her canvases have the hard edges
and saturated color that characterize
some West Coast abstraction o the
era. But her more surreal compositions
maintain a distinction between igure
and background, with forms lit from
behind and loating in deep space.
The artist, who died in 2010, was a
descendant o Frederic Remington,
the artist-bard o the Old West; in
both the bite o her colors and the
uniqueness o her forms, she was
every bit an American original, too.
Through Aug. 7. (Wallspace, 619
W. 27th St. 212-594-9478.)
Pamela Singh
In the nineties, long before the advent
o sel ies, Singh began making sly,
often ravishing pictures by inserting
hersel into landscapes and events in
her native India and other locales.
Whether she's staring out from a
corner o the frame or just passing
through the image (a trailing arm,
a scar on the breeze), Singh draws
her viewer in. She's equal parts
spiritual seeker, tourist, and travel
guide, ricocheting between temples,
markets, and a weight-lifters' gym,
enthralled and inquisitive. The
best pictures here are hand-painted
black-and-white prints, embellished
with stylized lowers and Tantric
designs---documents transformed
into dreams. Through July 17. (Sepia
Eye, 547 W. 27th St. 212-967-0738.)
Michael Smith
Like dark matter but nicer, this
droll performance, video, and
installation artist has long exerted
occult gravitational tugs on what can
still be called downtown sensibility.
His personae---the inexplicably
self-con ident artist Mike, the
ungovernable Baby Ikki---sweetly
mirror states o daft narcissism.
This immersive show o videos
(including a full- ledged original
ballet), photographs, sculpture, and
a narrative tapestry tracks Smith to
youth-themed scenes and sites. At
the Fountain o Youth Archeology
Park, in Florida, he seeks relie from
the ho-hum tragedies o aging. That
he is past sixty now seems to strike
him---and us, to our delight---as a
cosmic misunderstanding. Through
Aug. 15. (Greene Naftali, 508
W. 26th St. 212-463-7770.)
"Washington Color Painters
Reconsidered"
A luminous sampling o eight art-
ists boosts the recent revaluing o
color-intensive abstract painting,
which opposed and was crushed by
Pop and minimalism in the sixties.
The big names from D.C. feature
strongly, with an exceptionally
graceful "Unfurled"-series Morris
Louis and, strangely, with the nested,
oddball forms o Kenneth Noland's
"Missus" (1962). The surprise stars
are two black artists: Sam Gilliam, a
heterodox latecomer, and the outlier
Alma Thomas. Gilliam's immense,
e ulgently stained and splotched
canvas---draped from ceiling to loor,
more than forty-one feet wide---and
Thomas's vertical stripes o daubed,
scintillant hues feel as fresh as
this morning. They steal the show.
Through Aug. 1. (Howard, 525
W. 26th St. 212-695-0164.)
3
Galleries---Downtown
Roger Brown
Late, great works by the still under-
appreciated Chicago painter, who
died in 1997. Abstracted landscape
paintings (rolling hills and mountains
in the form o stripes and semicircles)
have frames that, on their lower
edges, extend into shelves. Brown,
like many o the Imagists in the
Second City, had a commitment to
folk traditions and self-taught artists,
and the little ledges in front o his
paintings support glazed co ee mugs,
earthenware sake cups, platters shaped
like shells, and a strange little fabric
model o a sofa. Brown's reduction o
his own paintings to backdrops for
these objects expresses his respect
for forgotten artisans. The objects
themselves recall the ex-votos left
for the saints in a million painted
icons, turning each o Brown's can-
vases into a memento mori. Through
Aug. 7. (Maccarone, 630 Greenwich
St. 212-431-4977.)
"Soft Core"
Four biting works on paper by Linder,
the veteran British punk, are the best
things in this N.S.F.W. show: vintage
black-and-white photos o pinups are
covered in marbled splotches and, in
one case, a lower blooming across a
model's face. Other highlights include
Suzannah Sinclair's watercolors o
nude women lounging on seventies-era
couches, Anne Doran's smut-collaged
gun targets, and Naomi Uman's ed-
ited skin lick, in which the images
o women have been scrubbed out,
leaving the men to couple with ghosts.
Adam Parker Smith's plush carpet,
marked with outlines o horses à la
the caves at Lascaux, could be décor
for a Watergate-era boom-boom room.
Through July 25. (Invisible Exports,
89 Eldridge St. 212-226-5447.)